Photon Tunneling Optical Interconnect

This Small Business Innovation Phase I project seeks to develop an innovative card-to-backplane optical interconnect technology based on photon tunneling. The proposed technology will provide a low-cost, high-efficiency means of directing light from a PCcard to a backplane without bending the photon waveguide.Furthermore, the proposed technology will provide low insertion-loss and high-spectral quality transmission thus allowing the addition of several photonic circuits operating at different wavelengths without significant cross-talk. The result will be ahighly-modular technology that will enable high-quality, high-speed computer networks to be realized.The benefits of the proposed technology fundamentally include high-quality, high-speed optical networks capable of being easily reconfigured. However, theproposed technology also has implications for high-spectral quality filters necessary for wavelength division multiplexing systems as well as, with slight modifications, being adapted as a rapid response chemical and biological sensor.The extent of the proposed technology is quite broad covering applications in telecommunications networks and photonic sensors, environmental and atmospheric monitoring, and medical diagnostics.